Atlanta
by mille libri
Summary: Greg tries to figure out how to start over.


_Thank you for reading!_

* * *

The apartment was small. And clean. And boring. No macaws, no cat, no smell of cigarette smoke or sound of coughing.

No one to talk to.

Greg thumbed his phone, scrolling through contacts to his dad's picture. After so many years—his whole life—of having his dad in the next room to talk to, here he was in Atlanta, alone, far from anyone. With no one to talk to.

His first thought was to go to a bar. You always had someone to talk to at a bar, especially if you were pleasantly drunk, feeling that warm, tingly buzz that said nothing really mattered, that said you were right and the world owed you.

He closed the phone. He was done with that buzz, and he was done with bars. And he had promised his dad he wouldn't call until he had spoken to at least ten people in Atlanta.

Greg went to the window and pulled aside the plastic blinds, looking down at the street. There were a couple of people waiting for a bus, a few more walking across the street to the hair dresser's on the other side, or the bank branch. He could go out and talk to them, flag them down, say hello, count them as someone new, and then call his dad … but that wasn't why he was here, was it? He was here to get a new start, far from everything he had always known. He had promised he would—even in the face of all his friends, of … Rebecca, he had stuck to that promise.

He had hovered on the edge of falling back into Bunch-sanity, but he had held firm. He would hold firm today.

Maybe he'd go try to meet someone on campus. Where in the hell did you meet people other than bars, anyway? Restaurants? No, people in restaurants thought you were weird if you started talking to them out of the blue. Weird or selling something—or trying to steal something. Probably people in bars would think that, too, if they were sober. Which they weren't, which was the point of going to bars.

One nice thing about Atlanta, Greg didn't even know where there were any bars. He could find one in a pinch, but there was an art to it. You couldn't get comfortable in just any bar.

But that was beside the point, which had been … He thought for a moment, then remembered. Where did sober people meet other people?

Campus wasn't a bad idea, but classes wouldn't start for a few days. He supposed he could walk down the halls of the apartment building, knocking on doors, but somebody would probably call the cops.

For a minute, he missed West Covina fiercely—what had he left home for, anyway? Business school? Who did that at his age? Maybe he should go back.

He looked around the apartment. He had rented it furnished; most of this stuff wasn't his, so it didn't matter if he left it behind. He could walk out of here and go straight to the airport and get on a plane and—say what to his dad? That he was too chicken to start over? That all that time sitting there in West Covina bitching about not being able to start his life had been a lie, and in fact he'd been too scared. Well, they both knew that. There was no point in Greg underlining it by coming back. He had nowhere to go, anyway. His dad's new place was too small for both of them and didn't allow anyone under retirement age.

Then that voice, the one softer than the one that told him the answer to everything was to get drunk, whispered to him that he could go to Rebecca's. He could get off a plane and into an Uber and out at her door and knock on it, and there she'd be, with her eyes and her smile and her round, heavy boobs and he could tell her that he'd been stupid to leave and he wanted to see where they could go together …

And tomorrow he'd wake up and hear her talking about Josh, he reminded himself. Or whatever crazy thing was in her head. Because what you got with Rebecca wasn't just her brains and her body and her infectious joy, it was the whole insane package, and that hadn't changed, and it wasn't any better for him than it had been when he left. Or for her, either, for that matter. And whatever help she needed, she wasn't going to get from him.

He couldn't go back, he told himself firmly, for what he'd like to think was the last time, letting the blinds fall and turning away from the window at last. The people out there still waiting for the bus had noticed him and were frowning at him. Apparently people in Atlanta didn't look out of windows. Actually, he couldn't remember ever looking out a window in West Covina, either. Did people look out of windows? If not, what were they there for?

Digging his phone out of his pocket, he unlocked it, his thumb hovering over the Instagram button. It couldn't hurt to see how many likes Chan's latest selfie had, could it? Check in with YJo and see what he and Darryl were up to? Look at what Hector's mom had made him for breakfast?

But Darryl worked with Rebecca. And Chan could be with her right now. And Hector's mom's food usually came out of a box. Probably CocoPuffs.

Greg shoved his phone back into his pocket and picked up his keys. He was going to a meeting, was what he was going to do. And he was going to stand up and tell all those other people who were trying not to take a drink his name and that he was all alone here, that his friends and his family and his life—and the woman he was pretty sure he loved—were on the other side of the country, and he was trying to make it through the night without taking a drink, so that tomorrow he could get up and start his life all over again. And they would nod, and say they knew it was hard, and they would help him get through it, and tomorrow he would do just that.

And someday he would get up in the morning and not think about West Covina, or Rebecca. No matter how long it took.


End file.
